Introduction, note by Anand Bhatt: 18/05 — Masters’ Course in Architectural Education: Aζ and Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Ansal University

The requirement was posited as a response to a series of observed events, even as the arrangements, negotiated so painstakingly in nineteen-seventies were coming apart. the Council of Architecture adopted a policy to increase the intake in Undergraduate Courses not only in response to a demand for more seats, but out of a common-sense that suggested, no matter what the consequence, an increase would induce a transformation similar to those experienced by other professions that made it possible for any citizen to avail the services of, say, a lawyer or an accountant for the first time in a long time.

So we posited the requirement with a degree of naivety, and a degree of cynical reasoning as Sloterdijk would let us have it: after all, surely, the increase in the ‘quantity’ of students will stress the ‘available supply’ of teachers, and as a consequence, impact the ‘quality of education’, no?

Two sample courses were produced at the TVB School of Habitat Studies and CEPT University to illustrate the scope of the course, its ambition, its structures and divergences, and here, our presumed ‘innocence’ had placed us in a bind: we had foolishly assumed Architectural Education — the reproduction of the disciplines of Architecture — occurs inside the classroom, our cynicism had led us to think it will happen inside the regime overseeing the Minimum Standards of Architectural Education, and our closed-world assumption had allowed us to assume : in the manner of engineers and design-thinkers : that a new kind of a specialist, a certified architectural educator who may be tasked to ‘solve’ the ‘problem at hand’.

Yet the idea of a Masters’ Course in Architectural Education is compelling, when we understand it as a tool to frame our ideas and direct conversation about teaching towards productive ends.